Cursos monográficos

Critical and speculative design highlights complexity around how we define a “better” future, and the negotiations inherent in these definitions of “better”. DiSalvo detailed how Dunne and Raby’s exhibition on energy use and consumption offered an alternative future to fossil fuels that might largely be understood as preferable, but that the alternative proposal that we should instead use live animals for energy may seem repugnant and undesirable to visitors (DiSalvo, 2009). This effect of speculative design is exemplified in the cases of Ambient Cycle and Ovum. Designing self-tracking devices

99

drawing on feminist and phenomenological commitments might be preferable since they avoid biological determinism and essentialism and facilitated new interactions with bodies, but findings from their deployments showed how the consequences of this posed concerns for our research participants. A large part of the research included in this dissertation has been documenting the ways in which the prototypes Ambient Cycle and Ovum did not live up to our participant’s expectations of what self-tracking technologies should do. The limitations and tensions inherent in the approach to designing for embodied subjectivity are also a contribution of this research. Though we chose and aimed towards re-configuring dualist and patriarchal cultures around self-tracking, our choices were not always reflected in the experience of our participants.

Because these devices were situated in the home environment, both physically and socially, other factors changed how Ovum and Ambient Cycle were used and perceived as self-tracking devices. For example, conflicting schedules and an ingrained sense of responsibility of the female partner due to the fact that it was their body being tracked, appeared to over-ride the ability of the design of Ovum to make fertility tracking a shared experience. There was also an inherent tension between Ambient Cycle being used to accurately represent the lived experience of the menstrual cycle and the fact that these colours were not appropriate for the home environment. Many participants turned off the device when Ambient Cycle was showing a colour that was unpleasant to live with. When asking one participant why she did not change the colours instead of turning the lamp off, she described how she couldn’t change the colours because otherwise it would not have fitted with the

100

“logic” she had used to depict her menstrual cycle; “what I'm feeling is not pleasant, so I should choose a not pleasing colour”.

The majority of our participants found Ovum and Ambient Cycle insufficient as self-tracking devices as they wanted Cartesian answers to the questions that they were asking their bodies. In line with the approach of designing for embodied subjectivity, Ovum and Ambient Cycle provided ambiguity and openness rather than certain truths about the body. Perceptions about how accurate or useful Ambient Cycle was as a menstrual cycle tracking tool was affected by the fact that Ambient Cycle did not give any diagnostic or numerical data back to the user. Similarly, the fact that the saliva tracking method required participants to read their fertile state from the data themselves, rather than being given a clear diagnosis of “fertile” or “not fertile” by the device, also resulted in the opinion that the device was untrustworthy and lacked certainty. Although adopting a DIY form of fertility tracking was a design decision intended to place the user of Ovum in the role of the expert of their own data, this in fact had the opposite effect as participants adopted mitigating practices such as sending photos of the projection to us to analyse for crystals; using one another to validate whether or not crystals were visible; testing more than one time a day or at a different time of day; and using other ovulation tracking methods to triangulate the results in order to compensate for the ambiguity of the results from Ovum. The prototypes Ovum and Ambient Cycle appeared to sit in between devices that complete a task and devices that provide an entertaining and aesthetic experience for our participants. The “sculptural” form and aesthetics of Ovum was first appreciated by participants, before later being described as clumsy. As one participant described “honeymoon phase is over.

101

Now I just want it to be like what it is supposed to be.”. Over time, this participant did not value the aesthetic experience of using Ovum, but rather wanted the device to be a functional tool. Rather than seeing this as a usability failing on the part of the design, these findings relate to the limits of design in re- configuring societal and cultural attitudes. Although technological artifacts are one aspect of how culture is produced, there are clearly many other aspects in play.

These findings contribute to understanding what kinds of embodied subjectivities already exist. Removal as a method showed how past use of technologies influences current and future experiences of using technological devices. We were not introducing Ovum and Ambient Cycle to a new mobius strip of embodied subjectivity; rather, our designs were troubling what already existed. The autoethnographies in the paper “removal as a method” and our participant’s reflections to the experience of living with Ambient Cycle and Ovum document how insecurity and ambiguity is experienced negatively when we lose an apparently accurate reading of our own body. This showed how deeply a Cartesian dualist epistemology had been ingrained in expectations of self-tracking technologies. This is despite the fact that all of the studies presented in this thesis illustrated how the body is always more erratic and irregular than self-tracking technologies depict them to be. As one participant in the Ambient Cycle study stated after describing how she had been surprised when Ambient Cycle was more accurate than her menstrual cycle tracking app at predicting her menstruation “the thing is that I think it's accurate, but then it's not. And then I think it's my body “Oh my period came wrong this month”. It's always been very irregular. But that's also a

102

weird way of looking at it. Like the app is the correct... I mean it’s my body that should be correct”.

The fact that this research program was found to produce devices that were understood by some participants as inadequate self-tracking tools leads to the question: what would be required for Ovum and Ambient Cycle to be accepted as valid examples of self-tracking technologies? The findings from the research presented in this thesis point to the fact that a change in culture, and perhaps a return to pre-modern cultures as suggested by Drew Leder in our interview, would be required. Dismantling Cartesian dualism and its promise of objectivity would be core to this. Whether or not this change in cultural expectations about what can be expected from self-tracking could be brought about by the widespread introduction of feminist and phenomenological devices is a relevant question, but one that is clearly beyond the scope of the research presented in this dissertation.

What does seem promising is that, although designing for embodied subjectivity lacks the ability to provide objective “truths” about the body, it also facilitates other aspects that benefit users in different ways. These include the aspects previously presented as being examples of how Ovum and Ambient Cycle might be described as redefining biological science through understanding the body as a generative, rather than limiting, factor. For example, our use of ambiguity facilitated the representation and documentation of a non- essentializing, wide range of subjective experiences of the menstrual cycle through the use of Ambient Cycle. By avoiding addressing bodily experience as a negative “dys-appearance” of the body, we facilitated the tracking of positive and neutral

103

aspects of the menstrual cycle with Ambient Cycle (D Leder, 1990). For example, one participant chose to use green to represent the “good” phase after menstruation where she had more energy and said; “I'm going to pay attention if it's really good these days”. This led to novel forms of interactions through self-tracking. Other examples of this was the use of Ambient Cycle to communicate hormonal states to other members of the household in order to encourage empathetic understanding, a reflexive use of data by using colours as therapeutic tools such as to calm or energize the users mood at different points of the menstrual cycle, and the fact that the “beautiful” experience of seeing crystals in the projection given by Ovum prompted participants to want to share the experience with their partners. Ambient Cycle and Ovum also both attend to the temporality of the body in novel ways; Ambient Cycle through giving a constant flow of menstrual cycle data at all points in the menstrual cycle, and Ovum for allowing the rise and fall in hormones around ovulation to be visible to the user. The designs resulting from designing for embodied subjectivity provided our participants with new ways of self-tracking and new experiences of themselves and their data. If the approach of designing for embodied subjectivity was adopted more widely in society, then these additional aspects would perhaps compensate for the negative experience of losing scientific objectivity when self-tracking the body; as Drew Leder stated in our interview “we can lean into that cyborg-facilitated self- awareness positively”.